


we're so evenly matched

by kuro49



Series: from New York with love [1]
Category: Suits (TV), White Collar
Genre: Gen, Neal as Danny Brooks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:47:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny paints a Rembrandt, Mike sees a Dalí. (And Neal mails a postcard in seven months.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're so evenly matched

**Author's Note:**

> A pre-series highschool!Neal and Mike fic, I honestly have no idea whether you need to know anything from the other fics for this one to make sense but [we don’t fall far](http://archiveofourown.org/works/628493) has a lot of the back story I drew this from.

“Oh Danny- _boy_.”

Mike coos, on his back with his head tipping back until he is staring at his friend upside down. He is lying sprawled across the worn couch at the Brooks’ home, like every other day of the week.

Mike doesn’t drop by unannounced though.

Because he knows every family’s got their issues. Of course, there is the really pretty woman Danny calls Ellen. But there are also reasons Mike has never met Danny’s mother in the five months that he has known him, not even once in the two months that he has taken to visit Danny’s place after school.

“Call me that again and I’ll—”

“What? _Paint_ me like one of your great masters?” Mike snickers with the low thrum running in his system, a slow crawl just below his skin. He doesn’t say it, but he does like it when Danny paints. And leaning by the windowsill is another classic masterpiece, outlined in pencil, slowly filling up with every stroke of paint Danny lays down.

Sometimes, it’s not even the way the final product turns out (he knows it’ll be perfect regardless, seen it in all the other reproductions Danny’s made, canvas after canvas of perfection stashed in a corner of his room). Sometimes, it’s the process. And Danny has one, that’s for sure.

Mike sees his slight frown, his moving lips before he comprehends the question Danny is asking him. “…Did you share one with Trevor before you got here?”

“Truthfully?” Mike answers absently as he toys with the zipper of his favourite grey hoodie.

“If you had to ask that, it was way more than one then.”

Mike zips it up all the way to his chin, and grins manically up at him. He has the world tilting just as he likes, his friend shaking his head at him wrong side up. And still, it doesn’t hide the smile Danny has on his face though. So Mike crows in triumph, silently in his head.

 

Mike doesn’t mind the lull in conversation, he likes the sweep of silence, in hearing the scratch of brushes against the canvas. But his eyes gets bleary when he smokes one too many, and his mouth likes to ask any and all questions that comes popping into mind. Mike closes his eyes and lights up another joint.

“…So, what’re you painting?”

“Rembrandt’s _The Storm on the Sea of Galilee_.” Danny replies, not missing a beat as he pushes open the window next to him. 

“You should do the man with the melting clocks and…stuff.” Because in perfect memory, captured like photographs in his head, Mike still can’t tell what all that _stuff_ really is.

“You don’t like this one?”

“—And I think you should replace the clocks with pizza.” Mike speaks between the smoke passing through his lips, his bones sagging against the worn sofa. “…But this one’s nice too. I like the man in the middle, the one looking out at you from the ship.”

He hears Danny’s laugh but doesn’t open his eyes, he lets the sound wash over him and smiles.

“You’re one of a kind, Mike.”

“So are you," he supplies in earnest, "you paint like a pro.”

 

Mike doesn’t know he falls asleep, but he wakes up to the buzzing at his stomach, a phone call from his Grammy that has him sitting straight only to fall right off the couch, his head already sharpening from the haze. He looks around in the dim living room and sees Danny still standing just where he left him, paint on his hands, painting by the lights in the streets.

He looks over at early evening light filtering through and sees a smaller canvas by the window.

“Is that a—”

“A Danny Brooks original, in the borrowed style of Salvador Dalí himself.”

Mike looks at the still drying painting and grins at the melting cheese of the pizza taking centre stage.

“Just for that, you get to have dinner at my place.”

“Don’t even try, _Michael_. Edith was the one to invite me.”

Mike makes a face, “I still can’t believe you call my grandmother that.”

Danny laughs, and it's a sound Mike likes a lot.

 

In three months time, Danny Brooks won’t exist. (But in seven months time, Mike will receive a postcard from NYC. While it might be Danny’s initials in the corner, he knows that Neal Caffrey is the one to send it, stamp and all.) Mike smiles, and wonders _when_ for the next one.

For now though, he’s got paint on his hands and he has smoke in his lungs, and they're so evenly matched just as they are.

XXX Kuro

**Author's Note:**

> I blame the use of Rembrandt’s _The Storm on the Sea of Galilee_ on _Trance_. Quick background on the painting: it was stolen in 1990 and still hasn’t been recovered today (cue all the Neal-totally-has-it-now-somehow-I-don’t-really-care-how headcanon). And the man in the middle, staring out from the canvas, is rumoured to be Rembrandt himself. 
> 
> Um, Dalí is Dalí, and I’ve always had a thing for his ink works.


End file.
